US ex-hedge fund manager gets unprecedented 11-year sentence
The Wall Street hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam has been sentenced to 11 years in jail for netting up to 72 million dollars as a result of insider trading.
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The sentence was the heaviest handed down for the offence in US history, although less than prosecutors had sought.
Raj Rajaratnam was a top student, brilliant trader and Wall Street's ultimate whizz kid before being found out as a cheat.
In handing down the 11-year-sentence, New York federal judge Richard Holwell described insider trading as a virus which needed to be eradicated.
The jail term would have been higher had Holwell not decided to take into account the fact Rajaratnam is suffering from kidney failure and needs an immediate transplant.
He was told he would remain free until 28 November when he must surrender to the authorities to begin his jail sentence.
The court was told that using his network, Rajaratnam had discovered market moving news before it had been made public and then traded on the supposedly secret information to make tens of thousands of dollars.
The scam involved such major companies as Goldman Sachs, Intel and Google.
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